Aeroacoustics of Dynamic Stall

Started

Renewable Energy Sources(Wind Energy)
Other Cross-Cutting Technologies or Research(Other Supporting Data)

Basic and strategic applied research

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Mechanical, Aeronautical and Manufacturing Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Dr M Azarpeyvand
Mechanical Engineering
University of Bristol

Standard

EPSRC

01 June 2023

30 November 2026

42 months

£684,478

Mechanical engineering

South West

NC : Engineering

Dr M Azarpeyvand, Mechanical Engineering, University of Bristol

Dr B Zang, Aerospace Engineering, University of Bristol

Project Contact, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL)
Project Contact, Hoare Lea and Partners
Project Contact, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), USA
Project Contact, Dowty Propellers Ltd
Project Contact, Deutsche WindGuard
Project Contact, University of Lyon
Project Contact, Vertical Aerospace Ltd
Project Contact, Embraer, Brazil
Project Contact, Siemens Gamesa
Project Contact, Oaklands College

It is well established that long-term exposure to aircraft and wind turbine noise is responsible for many physiological and psychological effects. According to the recent studies, noise not only creates a nuisance by affecting amenity, quality of life, productivity, and learning, but it also increases the risk of hospital admissions and mortality due to strokes, coronary heart disease, and cardiovascular disease. The World Health Organization estimated in 2011 that up to 1.6 million healthy life years are lost annually in the western European countries because of exposure to high levels of noise. The noise is also acknowledged by governments as a limit to both airline fleet growth, acceptability of Urban Air Mobility, operation and expansion of wind turbines, with direct consequences to the UK economy.With regards to aerodynamic noise, aerofoil noise is perhaps one of the most important sources of noise in many applications. While aerofoils are designed to achieve maximum aerodynamic performance by operating at high angles of attack, they become inevitably more susceptible to flow separation and stall due to changing inflow conditions (gusts, wind shear, wake interaction). Separation and stall can lead to a drastic reduction in aerodynamic performance and significantly increased aerodynamic noise. In applications involving rotating blades, the near-stall operation of blades, when subjected to highly dynamic inflows, gives rise to an even more complex phenomenon, known as dynamic stall. While the very recent research into the aerodynamics of dynamic stall has shown the complexity of the problem, the understanding of dynamic stall noise generation has remained stagnant due to long-standing challenges in experimental, numerical and analytical methods.This collaborative project, which includes contributions from strong industrial and academic advisory boards, aims to develop new understanding of dynamic stall flow and noise and develop techniques to control dynamic stall noise. The team will make use of the state-of-the-art experimental rigs, dedicated to aeroacoustics of dynamic stall and GPU-accelerated high-fidelity CFD tools to generate unprecedented amount of flow and noise data for pitching aerofoils over a wide range of operating conditions (flow velocity, pitching frequency/amplitude, etc.). The data will then be used to identify flow mechanisms that contribute to the different aerofoil noise sources at high angles of attack, including aerofoil unsteady loading and flow quadrupole sources, and detailed categorisation of dynamic stall regimes. A set of new frequency- and time-domain analytical tools will also be developed for the prediction of dynamic stall noise at different dynamic stall regimes, informed by high-fidelity experimental and numerical datasets. This project will bring about a step change in our understanding of noise from pitching aerofoils over a wide range of operations and pave the way to more accurate noise predictions anddevelopment of potential noise mitigation strategies.

18/10/23